The K-12 Teacher and the Computer

On "the deconstruction of the K-12 teacher", we see When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher - The Atlantic

I think it used to be taboo for teachers to borrow or buy plans written by other professionals, but it seems that times are changing. Just last week, I spoke with a history teacher from Santa Maria, California, who bluntly said, "I don’t ever write my own lesson plans anymore. I just give credit to the person who did." He explained, rather reasonably, that the materials are usually inexpensive or free; are extremely well made; and often include worksheets, videos, assessments, and links to other resources. Just as his administrators request, he can focus on being a facilitator, specializing in individualized instruction.

I’ve started recognizing a common thread to the latest trends in teaching. Flipped learning, blending learning, student-centered learning, project-based learning, and even self-organized learning—they all marginalize the teacher’s expertise. Or, to put it more euphemistically, they all transform the teacher into a more facilitative role....

Note that there's no claim here that the teacher is being marginalized; it's the teacher's expertise. And that might make a fundamental difference in who is qualified to be a teacher, and what pay scales should eventually be. Interesting.

NSF EdTech

Reports on reporting about what we're learning about learning (and, of course, teaching about teaching) at the Huffington Post's 7 Cyberlearning Technologies Transforming Education | Aaron Dubrow

...NSF funds basic cyberlearning research and since 2011 has awarded roughly 170 grants, totaling more than $120 million, to EdTech research projects around the country.

The speakers in the lecture series, all leading cyberlearning scholars, ... represent the forces transforming what education may look like in the future.

1. Classroom as Virtual Phenomenon: RoomQuakes and WallScopes

HelioRoom simulates the orbital motion of the planets in the Solar system on a set of synchronized computer displays situated on the walls of the classroom, with planets "orbiting" around the periphery of the room. ...

... RoomQuake, an earthquake simulation system where the classroom itself becomes an active seismic area. At unpredictable times throughout the unit, rumbles emanating from speakers attached to simulated seismographs signal to the class that an earthquake is occurring....

Students rush to terminals around the classroom, read the data from seismograms .... Over the course of six weeks and dozens of earthquakes, students discover a "fault line" emerging. ...

Tablets adjacent to the walls of classrooms serve as viewports into an imaginary space inside the walls filled with the virtual fauna in Wallcology. ...

2. Games for Good: Learning While You Play

... in the game "Citizen Science," created by Squire and his team, players help restore Lake Mendota, a real lake in Wisconsin that, in the year 2020, has become polluted. As players explore the landscape, they take water samples, interact with a virtual, simulated watershed and talk with stakeholders....

... for a game that might reach even broader audiences, Squire and colleagues created Progenitor X, a zombie-themed tissue engineering game. In Progenitor X, players learn about the relationships between cells, tissues, and organs while trying to survive a zombie invasion. ... As a member of The Progenitor X Defense Force, you are a part of a highly trained squad of scientists who use highly advanced bio-medical technology to locate, seek out, and treat infected humans to contain the threat. ....

"These projects are not only using technologies that only recently became possible. They also build on decades of excellent research on how people learn," said Chris Hoadley, the program officer at NSF who leads the Cyberlearning program. "I believe it's only by advancing technology design and learning research together that we'll be able to imagine the future of learning."...

3. Teaching Tykes to Program: Never Too Young to Control a Robot

... Bers described her latest project, the KIWI robotic kit (subsequently renamed KIBO), which teaches programming through robotics, without screens, tablets, or keyboards. Using KIBO, students scan wooden blocks to give robots simple commands, in the process learning sequencing, one of the most important skills for early age groups. By combining a series of commands, kids make the robot move, dance, sing, sense the environment or light up....

4. Virtual role-play and robo-tutors

... Virtual role-play - where learners engage in simulated encounters with artificially intelligent agents that behave and respond in a culturally accurate manner - has been shown to be effective at teaching cross-cultural communication.

"You learn by playing a role in a simulation of some real life situation"

"We found in our military training that when soldiers use this approach, once they get into a foreign country -- let's say they're sitting down with local leaders -- they feel as if it's a familiar situation to them... Moreover, the software could address the shortage of qualified teachers able to teach Chinese, Arabic and other less popular languages... The first Web-based course was tested last year via Virtual Virginia, a statewide virtual school program, and received overwhelmingly positive ratings from the students....

5. Tools for Real-time Visual Collaboration

... "Computers have been individualistic devices," said Ramani. "But a new class of technology is emerging that allows us to engage in our individual learning process and also in a collaborative process." SkWiki ... allows many participants to collaboratively create digital multimedia projects on the web using many kinds of media types, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs....

6. Fusing data collection, computational modeling and data analysis

Simulation and modeling have come to be regarded as the "third pillar" of science... ... By embedding simulations and sensor data collectors in the classroom, Dorsey and Wilensky are able to aid students in gathering, visualizing and analyzing data from multiple sources. A principal innovation of InquirySpace is the integration of the Concord Consortium's CODAP data exploration software with the modeling environments. This integration enables students to plan extended investigations of models, to do sophisticated analyses of the model runs, and to engage in arguments from evidence. ...

7. Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality: Increasing ecological understanding

... Two decades ago, with funding from NSF, Dede started investigating head-mounted displays and room-sized virtual environments... At the beginning of the two to four week EcoMUVE curriculum, the students discover that all of the fish in a virtual pond have died. They then work in teams to determine the complex causal relationships that led to the die-off. The experience immerses the students as ecosystem scientists. ... At the end of the investigation, all of the students participate in a mini-scientific conference where they show their findings and the research behind it.

I don't know how well the experiments will scale up, but I would like to note that all of this seems to require ending the teaching-to-the-test that the last few posts have been about. They all seem to require teamwork, but none of them have much to do with traditional lectures. All of them have a learn-by-doing framework, where the computer facilitates the doing -- or even provides the universe for that doing to be done in.

Motivation, Feedback, Content

For an infovore like me, the Internet does indeed seem like a gigantic, interactive version of the libraries that took (or do I mean provided?) so much of my childhood -- and between them, they've served as basis for self-education that keeps on going. But does that provide an alternative to classroom learning for normal people? I dunno. Arnold Kling suggests in Online Self-Education: The Bigger, Closer Library | askblog that we

think of learning as requiring motivation, feedback, and content. The library has the content, but you have to be motivated to use it and you need feedback to know whether you are using it well. Perhaps right now the classroom provides better motivation and feedback.

However, I expect within a few years to see feedback systems on phones and tablets that are at least competitive with the feedback process that occurs in a classroom. At that point, the only contribution that classroom time can make is to help with motivation–teachers motivating students and students motivating one another.

That's quite a claim, but it's not at all impossible. Feedback systems on phones and tables will not, of course, be similar to the feedback system provided by a teacher any more than a sewing machine's motions are similar to those of a traditional seamstress. However, the app that reacts to your input will have learned from experience with tens of millions of students, some of whom had more or less exactly the problem you're having. Dissimilar != worse.

Algorithms learning about human learning

One consequence of the online-5-minute-lecture (e.g., Khan Academy) approach is that with lessons broken into bite-size pieces, each of which has associated exercises, it's easier to test the effectiveness of any given piece. Khan Academy, Video tasks on the learning dashboard

Many of our exercises are tagged with “curated related videos”—videos that are hand-selected as related to the exercise. Using this as a starting point, we looked at all the videos that were already tagged as related to any exercise. For each of these videos, we compared the accuracy on its associated exercise both before watching the video and after watching it. From there, we selected the top fifty most effective videos, each improving the accuracy on its associated exercise by at least twenty percent, and are now highlighting them on the mission dashboard. When the system recommends an exercise with an associated video on the list of our top fifty related videos, it will automatically recommend the related video as well.

Compare with a human teacher who is trying to see which explanations are most helpful, judging class reaction and then perhaps a weekly quiz...the algorithm is of course completely incapable of what the human does, but on the other hand it has immediate access to individual data about what works for whom. In the not-terribly-long run we should be able to have videos tagged as having different styles (highly compressed v. wordy, words v. equations v. pictures, rules v. examples, humor v. straight exposition...) and automatically choose whichever works for given students based on what has improved their scores in the past. I suppose in the very long run we're moving towards a time and motion study program for small units of learning-effort.

Or then again, maybe not.

Educational Video on Educational Videos

Derek Muller "completed a PhD in physics education research from the University of Sydney in 2008. His thesis, Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education, was the subject of his TEDxSydney talk in 2012..."

And the talk (6 minutes) is here:
The principal result seems to be that, at least for his subject (simple physics, e.g. of a tossed basketball) and his subjects (introductory university physics students), it can worse than useless to provide a simple, clear, comprehensible demo of what you're trying to explain, and then test them on it. Their answers will not improve, but their confidence in those answers will rise. Why? They will actually remember statements that definitely weren't in the short video they just saw, statements that accord with their existing misconceptions, and those misconceptions will be reinforced...

Huh? Does that even make sense? Sure: they report low engagement on the clear, comprehensible demo... They're not really listening as long as they think they understand the events (and annotations) in the video, so it just reinforces what they think they already know.

How to fix this? Muller's answer: cover the misconceptions first, and use dialogue. Yes, you will annoy people who think you're actively trying to make them feel dumb, but if you don't cover the misconceptions they will not engage.

Ok, it's interesting, and it could be crucial for almost all kinds of education of almost all kinds of students, too. Start With The Misconceptions. Have A Dialogue Character Representing the Teachably Wrong Point of View. Yeah. But for some reason I'm thinking of a dialogue that started with the misconceptions, started with a character named Simplicio, Galileo Galilei's

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII, thus alienating not only the Pope but also the Jesuits...

It is not always wise to clarify misconceptions, at least not from the perspective of wishing to avoid arrest.

Or then again, maybe it's worth it. 

Teaching Entrepreneurship

Yong Zhao keeps explaining that the crucial skills we're not teaching are those of entrepreneurs...Well, here's a single MOOC course that tries to be the capstone of the program we're not providing, at Udacity Blog: How to Build a Startup Available With Certificates, Coaching & Project

Taught by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, who founded eight startups, with four that have gone public, this class teaches you the key steps necessary to bring your product from concept to market. With the full course experience, you will talk to customers, build a Business Model Canvas, prototype your product, and pitch to coaches.

After completing a final project, you’ll also earn a certificate verifying your new entrepreneurship skills. Don’t let that next million dollar idea get away.

I don't believe that this has college-course prerequisites; I wonder if it would be a good idea to use its ideas as an implied critique of a high-school curriculum.

Knowledge Maps and Custom Courses

Take a quick look at the Khan Academy Knowledge Map and then think about The Chronicle of Higher Education asking Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead

People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses?

That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations.

“The very notion of a ‘class’ may be outdated,” the report argues.

Indeed; a course is an administrative tactic, and we may be moving beyond it. At every level. I posted about the idea a couple of years ago, in Open-Source Learning. Perhaps it's getting somewhere.

Or then again, maybe not. Comments at Slashdot

Chromebooks in education

Gadgets come and gadgets go. A few years ago I thought netbooks would become standard courseware; then tablets; now chromebooks? From a couple of weeks ago: Chromebooks Are Outselling iPads In Schools - Slashdot

Apple thrilled investors earlier this week when they revealed that they had sold 13 million iPads to schools and claimed 85% of the educational tablet market, but that wasn't the whole story. It turns out that Apple has only sold 5 million iPads to schools since February 2013, or an average of less than a million tablets a quarter over 6 quarters. It turns out that instead of buying iPads, schools are buying Chromebooks. Google reported that a million Chromebooks were sold to schools last quarter, well over half of the 1.8 million units sold in the second quarter. With Android tablets getting better, Apple is losing market share in the consumer tablet market, and now it looks Apple is also losing the educational market to Google.

So, for people who haven't been following this development...I'd already heard people claiming Chromebooks and education: A perfect match | ZDNet

Chromebooks, in general, are good choices for schools. They're lightweight, durable, inexpensive, secure, and fun to use....

He makes a good point about Chromebook having "the most secure operating system," and I knew about Google's own Chrome for Education and Chromebooks for Education Overview - YouTube pages, and "Manage 10 or 10,000 Chromebooks with ease"... Also about collections like Free Technology for Teachers: 30 Ideas for Using Chromebooks in Education. However, I hadn't noticed Private school’s Chromebook program explains why Google’s laptops have captured nearly 20% of the educational market - TechRepublic:

So, the school began throwing things out there to see what would stick. They got some iPads, Android tablets, Lenovo tablets, and Chromebooks. The wow factor was high with the iPads, and the school was convinced they were going to be an iPad school, until the kids started trying to produce content on them. At this point the focus shifted to entirely to the Chromebook and Google Apps, where content was easy to produce and collaboration came naturally.

In public schools, Google In Education: Chromebooks A 'Right Time Technology' For Passaic, New Jersey School District

Google‘s Chromebook — and by extension Chrome OS — is being adopted by our education system at a brisk pace. As of February 2013 more than 2000 districts in the United States have deployed Chromebooks to their students and faculty. I’ve reported on Chromebooks before, but I wanted to take a deeper dive and explore the benefits as perceived by superintendents and IT directors.

And I also hadn't realized how well you can Use your Chromebook offline - Chromebook Help. It really does look good. So maybe we're actually moving towards the One True Technology which won't be forgotten five years from now.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.

Independent (online) learning

A freshman survey from UCLA found High School Students Not Waiting For Schools To Go Online

"Students who chose to independently use online instructional websites are also more likely to exhibit behaviors and traits associated with academic success and lifelong learning."

So, never mind what the school does -- make sure your kids check out Coursera and Khan Academy and CrashCourse - YouTube (with the individual "courses" like Biology (That's Why Carbon Is A Tramp: Crash Course Biology #1) and World History and so on), not to mention random excellence like SciShow Space and MinutePhysics and MinuteEarth, individual user channels like Vi Hart (a recreational mathemusician who works for Khan Academy) and SmarterEveryDay, and ...
There's a lot of cool stuff out there. Learning it has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with grades. On the other hand, learning it helps a lot with later "academic success and lifelong learning."

Disruption

I strongly doubt the "2015" here, but I think "The Futurist" is right to think that the education industry is headed for a multi-faceted disruption of the general sort that he describes: the jobs and careers that will best survive in the 21st century will require skills that we now associate with a college degree, and personality traits which we often signal with a college degree, but they don't actually require a degree of any kind. And that opens us up to changes in education. The Futurist: The Education Disruption : 2015

Google, always leading the way, no longer mandates college degrees as a requirement, and has recently disclosed that about 14% of its employees do not have them. If a few other technology companies follow suit, then the workforce will soon have a pool of people working at very desirable employers, who managed to attain their position without the time and expense of college. If employers in less dynamic sectors still have resistance to this concept, they will find it harder to ignore the growing number of resumes from people who happen to be alumni of Google, despite not having the required degree. As change happens on the margins, it will only take a small percentage of the workforce to be hired by prestigious employers.

...  the ever-increasing variety of technological disruption means that the foremost career of the modern era is that of the serial entrepreneur. If universities are not the place where the foremost career can be learned, then how important are formal degrees from these universities? Since each entrepreneurial venture is different, the individual will have to synthesize a custom solution from available components.

... Udacity, Coursera, MITx, Khan Academy, and Udemy are just a few of the entities enabling low-cost education at all levels. Some are for-profit, some are non-profit. Some address higher education, and some address K-12 education. Some count as credit towards degrees, and some are not intended for degree-granting, but rather for remedial learning. But among all these websites, an innovative pupil can learn a variety of seemingly unrelated subjects and craft an interlocking, holistic education that is specific to his or her goals. ....
(Moody's has already downgraded the outlook of the entire US higher education industry). But most importantly, the most valuable knowledge will become increasingly self-taught from content available to all, and the entire economy will begin the process of adjusting to this new reality.

Parts of this are certainly true.

Civics Games

I've written a bit about educational games previously; now I see retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor getting into the act, at Citizenship goes digital: Online gaming effective in teaching civics -- ScienceDaily

Can playing online video games help students learn civics education? According to Baylor University researchers, the answer is yes. Brooke Blevins, Ph.D., assistant professor of curriculum and instruction and Karon LeCompte, Ph.D., assistant professor of curriculum and instruction in Baylor's School of Education studied the effectiveness of iCivics, a free online website founded by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that teaches civics concepts using 19 educational games.

The study, published in The Journal of Social Studies Research, shows iCivics is an effective tool for teaching civics concepts to primary and middle school students.

As part of the study, more than 250 students in two Waco-area school districts played iCivics games for six weeks, twice a week for 30 minutes. Students took pre-tests and post-tests and completed journal entries on their experience. ... Statistically, most of the grades showed improvement in their civics education, but with younger students exhibiting the most gains.

"Students in grades 5 and 8 showed improvement in test scores with eight-grade students scoring nearly five points higher on both," Blevins said. "Students in fourth grade showed a marked improvement of nearly 10 points, the highest out of all of the grades."

In the long run, there will be a large part of each kid's education which is provided this way, and it will be very cheap as well as self-motivating. I do wonder how large the part will be.

Flipped Classrooms and Class Size

The flipped classroom (Amazon link to cited book) doesn't depend on the Khan Academy. I note a New York Times op-ed on Turning Education Upside Down

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates....
Like everything disruptive, online education is highly controversial. But the flipped classroom is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees on. ... many people are holding it up as a potential model of how to use technology to humanize the classroom.

It is a strategy to maximize human contact by teachers. Interestingly, once we learn to use it effectively, there is really no such thing as "class size". Teachers spend their time interacting with small groups and individuals, no matter whether there are 20 students per grade or 2000.

Instant Feedback

The New York Times reports onNew Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level - NYTimes.com

EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers.

The software will be freely available to any institution that wants to use it, and apparently the grading results (after initial training) are within the range of variation expected of human graders. I'd expect that for years to come, the "artificial intelligence" code will fall short in the sense that a student who understands it (and would be getting excellent grades anyway) could use that understanding to get excellent grades for essays that any human would say are lousy. In practice, that may not matter: the essays will be online, which means that students trying to "cheat" in this way will have to face the fact that some of those essays will be seen by human readers; perhaps a random selection, perhaps at a later time, and some courses will be designed so that students read and react to two essays for each essay which they write, to provide supplementary feedback. I would think that the main value of the system will be the instant feedback that it provides; a student can submit, consider the response, submit, consider the response, submit... And learn.

Or then again, maybe not.

Hybrid Course Research

 This is research on introductory-level university course design; I believe it applies reasonably directly to present and near-future advanced high school (e.g., AP) courses as well. Basically, it seems to be saying that the expensive way we're teaching these now is not buying us anything. We can do better, cheaper, with "hybrid" courses (they aren't trying purely online courses).... Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials | Ithaka S+R

randomly assigning students on six public university campuses to take the course in a hybrid format (with machine-guided instruction accompanied by one hour of face-to-face instruction each week) or a traditional format (as it is usually offered by their campus, typically with 3-4 hours of face-to-face instruction each week).
We find that learning outcomes are essentially the same—that students in the hybrid format "pay no price” for this mode of instruction in terms of pass rates, final exam scores, and performance on a standardized assessment of statistical literacy. These zero-difference coefficients are precisely estimated.

If this is true (and it looks quite solid), then a merged district's enhanced ability to get groups together for specialized courses is seriously weakened as a motivator.


Or then again, maybe not.

Attention Span and Testing

It's really hard to pay attention to all of a long presentation; back when I was a brand-new (and really bad) asst. prof of computer geekery at the University of Delaware, the Center for improvement in teaching (or some such name) explained that typical lecture retention was 17% -- I remember the number, more than thirty years later, but not the experimental support for it. One way to improve, which I never really mastered, was simply to break up the lecture into small chunks for which retention would be at least a bit higher -- and ask questions in between. Good teachers do that, they don't get lost in their lecture thoughts. Today I see Harvard psychologists saying that the questions-in-between pattern also works online: I admit that I don't see that it's all that different, but they say Online learning: It's different

in both experiments, students who were tested between each segment -- but not the others, even those who were allowed to study the material again -- showed a marked drop in mind-wandering and improved overall retention of material.
"It's not sufficient for a lecture to be short or to break up a lecture as we did in these experiments," Schacter said. "You need to have the testing...." Those tests...act as an incentive for students to pay closer attention to the lecture because they know they'll have to answer questions at the end of each segment.
Another surprising effect of the testing, Szpunar said, was to reduce testing anxiety among students, and to ease their fears that the lecture material would be very challenging.

I'm filing this under "Independent experimental evidence that the Khan Academy is doing it right."


Or then again, maybe not.

Pod People

Udacity announces Course Pods: A New Way to Connect With Classmates

Udacity! What do you love about online learning? Udacity students have gotten in touch with us to rave about two things: flexibility and community.
Our classes are awesome because you can learn at your own pace (we’re lookin’ at you, back button) and from anywhere you want (no one knows you took that quiz from the bathroom)!
Now, while learning at your own pace and from your own place, you might be wondering about your classmates. Our passionate students love connecting for study sessions, helping each other through tough spots in the course, collaborating on group projects, and having fun along the way.
Our study groups are a cornerstone of our student community, and they just got a little bigger! You can already start your own study group through the course forums and Meetup.com. We are delighted to introduce...Course Pods!

I don't know that "Course Pods" will prove successful in Udacity itself or in a K-12 context, but I do think that the only way to find out is to try.


Or then again, we may just end up with pod people.

Networks of Imagination

Ken Bausch mentioned this last December; The Global One-Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown | DMLcentral

In this video, which contains the highlights of his “Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner” keynote at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco, he introduces the fascinating notion of “a global one-room schoolhouse through networks of imagination.”

It seems to me that this is quite compatible with Sal Khan's vision (and book) that I've mentioned a few times, but it's an interestingly different point of view. I'm inclined to see it as a mix of Khan with some of Yong Zhao's World Class Learners, but that oversimplifies as usual. I do see him as detecting and approving a trend towards tools like Scoot & Doodle | Get Creative Together, which has just received fairly major support from Pearson among others.

Google+ Hangout App Scoot & Doodle Raises $2.25M Seed, From Valley Angels & Pearson, To Get More Kids Learning Through Play | TechCrunch

Well, maybe not just kids, or just play; I'll add some emphasis in a quote from the GeekDad report on Scoot & Doodle: Makes Google Hangouts a Collaborative Playspace | GeekDad | Wired.com

essentially, it is an app that works with Google+Hangouts and lets you type, draw and engage in a visual and tactile way – as well as through video and voice. In my use of it I have found it to be really stable and offer a fluid and worthwhile experience whether with my kids or with business colleagues. Like many startups there appears to be more potential applications than you can imagine; however, kudos for both the Scoot & Doodle team and Pearson for seeing the potential of this in the education and learning space.

And I certainly approve of the idea that education works off study groups that fit in a Google+ Hangout. That works.

Or then again, maybe not.

All that Jazz -- Education Analogy

Alex Tabarrok, economics professor and co-founder of the online Marginal Revolution University, comments on Online Education and Jazz

there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience...It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience... and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:

Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.

Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.

I think that's true, but I think that maybe he's missing part of the point of his own work and that of other online services: online teaching environments and live teaching environments both offer opportunities for interaction, and for student improvisation. Online teaching can (and probably will) get better with time, the techniques are reasonably cumulative. The approach of, say, the Berlitz LP records that helped me learn Spanish fifty years ago is still available online -- it is now supplemented, not entirely replaced, with the game-like approach of Rosetta Stone which one of my sons used recently, to help get ready to go to Nicaragua with some old friends from HCS. Live teaching from a great teacher is not cumulative in the same way (I was a worse teacher than most of my teachers, no matter how hard I tried.)

If MOOCs were going to be "everybody watch the same lecture and then take the same exam", that would be of some value, and the use of a great teacher could increase that value greatly...but that's not what's happening. On places like CourseTalk | MOOC Reviews & Ratings you can learn who is teaching what and how, and how well it worked...you can learn about online courses, yes. But at the same time, when you interact with software like that of the Khan Academy, that software is learning about you. In fact it can pay more individual attention to you than any human teacher can, outside of the traditional 1-1 ideal, and it can eventually improve on that 1-1 ideal because it can try out different approaches on millions of students -- different explanations, different experiences suggested by thousands of different teachers and students. It can note which works for whom -- and it can compare you to more somewhat-similar students than any 1-1 human teacher can ever make notes on.

Will it ever outdo human teaching in every respect? Gee, I dunno. But it can certainly outdo human teaching in many respects.

Or then again, maybe not.

Granny Cloud

Sugata Mitra is mainly known for his kids'-self-education TED talks in 2007: Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves and 2010: The child-driven education. He continues, with the 2013 TED Prize, to develop A School in the Cloud and the Future of Learning

Mitra recruited an army of retired teachers, all women, whom he dubbed the “granny cloud.” The grannies connected to Mitra’s schools via Skype, and when the kids were assembled in groups of four to six they asked questions like “Can anything be less than zero?” “Will robots be conscious one day?” and “How do my eyes know to cry when I am sad?”
Then they sat back and let the kids do the learning, injecting themselves only to offer the kind of encouragement that only grannies can. “If there is a child in trouble we beam in a Gran,” Mitra jokes. What Mitra saw was that the Granny cloud kids’ English improved, their science scores soared. By most measures they were learning more and more quickly, and doing it mostly on their own. “It just requires broadband, collaboration and encouragement,” Mitra says.
... What Mitra proposes is the dismantling of an educational machine created by the British over centuries of Empire building.... “I am not saying its bad, it’s brilliantly constructed, but it’s not needed.”
What Mitra envisions are “schools in the cloud,” classes of 24 students in actual brick-and-mortar spaces managed in person by his volunteer grannies. The grannies ask the questions, offer the encouragement, everything else happens remotely, the lights, heating, and locks are all manipulated via the cloud. For now Mitra envisions these cloud schools will function as a supplement...

If Mitra's vision (in many countries) seems to be working, it's likely that we'll see volunteer+paid organizations of grannies, grandpas, and others, trying to make small schools work better by a mix of "child-driven" online and offline experience. It might be effective, too.
Or then again, maybe not.

Exploration (v.?) Explanation

Khan-Academy style videos are sometimes criticized because they are lecture-based explanations rather than student-centered explorations; of course they're student controlled, but that sounds bad and contrary to Good Modern Pedagogy. The Khan Academy lead developer answers questions on Slashdot: Interviews: Khan Academy Lead Developer Ben Kamens Answers Your Questions - Slashdot

The fundamental belief of Khan Academy is that students should engage with content they need on-demand, at their own pace. We agree that any curriculum that forces all students in a class to follow the same, preordained "watch this video, do this exercise, watch this other video" path isn't using technology in a meaningful way. ...
Our classrooms see varying implementations, but the best of them try hard to help students move at their own pace. Some students might never need to listen to Sal say a word. They can master content by experimenting on their own. Absolutely. Fine. By. Us.
Khan Academy exists to give students the freedom to engage with the content they need while giving teachers immediate feedback about who's working on what and where they need help. We think we can help teachers by making this acquisition of core skills a more personalized, efficient process.
In doing so, we hope to move teachers _up_ the value chain so they can focus on exploration-based learning and targeted coaching with the rest of their class time.
I personally think that'd be a significant advance in learning. And FWIW, we consider anybody who fights for exploration-based learning to be an ally of Khan Academy.

That certainly fits the One World Classroom vision...and it really Just Might Work.


Or then again, maybe not.